Sudden death

Sudden death is hexabomb’s secondary game mode. It is based on the classical game mode described in Game description.

The main difference is the players’ objective: They must now survive as long as possible without any consideration about the coloration of cells.

Game rules modifications

  • Character death is permanent: revive action is not allowed.
  • The score of a player is the number of turns it survived, that is to say the maximum turn number when it still had alive characters.
  • There is a special player (identified by \(playerID = 0\)) that hunts and kills other players’ characters. The characters of this special player respect modified rules.
    • Not affected by bomb explosions.
    • Can drop as many bombs as they desire.
    • Can drop bombs with delays and ranges in \([2,100]\).

How to detect current game mode?

This depends on the number of special players that is received in the GAME_STARTS message.

  • 0 special players means the game mode is classical (described in Game description).
  • 1 special player means the game mode is sudden death.

What is the special player strategy?

  • Attack close enemies.
  • Try to circle enemies.
  • Block small paths with bombs that have a long delay.

The following video shows a sudden death game with the special player (ghost characters) and random players (cat characters).